RulerBreaker

Graduations of MTB Fail

2010-11-13T13:06:00.001-08:00

1. You have to put a foot down for balance. Also know as 'dip'

When we ride technical trails like the Tapeworm in Renton we count dips. You get minus one point for every time you have to put down a foot for balance a plus one point for every obstacle you ride that you could have ridden around. My personal best (twice) is no dips and all but one obstacles. Not because I could not ride it, but because I always overlook it.

2. Don’t lose bike. Both feed down.

This has happened for me too many times to count, however, the most clear example of this kind of fail is on the steep technical rock sections of Tiger. There are sections which I have never seen anyone actually manage to ride up. But you also don’t really fall. You just head at it and eventually have to give up and put both feed down.

3. Lose the bike but don’t fall

My best example of this kind of fail was on a ride at Paradise. It was dark, I did not have a light, I was alone, cold, and really just wanted to go home. I took a shortcut and my bike got stuck in mud and disappeared under me. I walked through the air, landed on my feet, ran a bit and stopped. Picked the bike up and rode on.

4. Lose bike and you are on the ground but don’t get hurt.

This happened to me riding downhill on Mount Hood. It was Sunday, race day, and I went down on my first practice run but I did not realize just how much till much later. It felt like a category 3 fail, but after my second practice run when I pulled up to the camp, and started taking my gear off, I noticed that I had dirt on all of my left leg and all of my left arm. I would like to thank our sponsor 661. Without 661, this would have been a category 5 or 6 fail.

5. Fall and get flesh wounds

This has happened a lot for me but is best exemplified by a cross country ride at Duthie Hill. Well, it was a night of mostly cross country, but we also did this intermediate jump line and I tried a line I normally don’t take and paid for it. My left leg and arm were quite bloody but nothing serious. Just flesh wounds. Took a bit of paper towels to be ready for dinner but all good fun. Still have the scars.

6. Fall and get hurt and you are limping for more than a day but less than a week. Bruises.

It was a Thursday night ride. It was dark. Autumn. Steep. One of my favorite spots near Seattle and someone had dropped in before me and I thought I could catch them so I let go of the brakes. My front tire got caught in a root and I went down hard, my left leg caught between the frame and the handlebars. By Saturday evening I could sort of walk normally again. By Sunday morning I felt alright. As of this writing, two weeks later my leg is still blue and yellow from the bruises but the hurt has gone away.

7. It really hurts. You aren't out of riding, but walking or lifting things is annoying for a couple of weeks

Port Angeles (PGA) Downhill. Race run. I let go and go too fast through a rocky section. I go down. Slide through the rocks and my knee protection slides down. I got up again as if this had been a category 5 fail but fell twice more during that run. Turned out I had gotten really badly hurt on the top of my knees and I had a terrible time driving the four hours home and did not walk normally for at least three weeks. Worst thing is I had another category 7 fail at PGA earlier in the season where I really hurt my left arm.

8. You are out for a bit. Can ride with pain killers, may have permanent nerve damage

Ever extended yourself beyond what you should be doing? I have. Duthie hill. Had been practicing on Semper Dirticus jump line and wanted more. Went to the DWB jump line and dropped in. The first part is easy and forgiving but the first big step down is preceded by three small bumps and I just could not get enough speed to do the step down. Eventually I figure the bumps out and did the step down. I was super excited. Whoo'ed as I went through the air and was just happy so I did it again and again. On the third time down I was so happy that I forgot to pay attention and just continued over the next double, came in super nose heavy and crashed very very hard on my front. My gear took most of the impact but my front right upper leg got badly injured. Eventually a big something appeared on my leg, filled with some kind of fluid. It has since gone away but I have almost no sense left in my upper right leg. This was a Tuesday. On Friday I went to Port Angeles for my first time down hilling ever and got the category 7 fail on my left arm in practice. I was out that Saturday but raced Sunday. Not a good week for riding in my book although making that step down felt good.

9. Break something and you cannot ride for a while. May need surgery

I have fortunately not ever been in this category but Larry whom I ride with broke his collarbone at Whistler, Eric has broken his foot, Al has broken both his collarbones, and Clinton is due for surgery on his arm soon. So not at all unlikely. I will try to remain rubbery as I will much rather have a category 8 or 7 fail than a 9 or above.

10. Fully or semi paralyzed. You will probably never ride again.

I have fortunately never hear about anyone to whom this happened on a mountain bike. Its probably because of the protection we wear. Again I would like to thank our sponsor 661 for saving my bacon on more than one occasion. I have seen this happen for people on skis and rock climbing, but when I flew 8 feet through the air and landed on my head against a big log, I walked away pretty much unharmed because I was wearing a 661 helmet.

11. Death

Death happens a whole lot less in mountain biking than it does in for instance rock climbing and mountaineering. I think this is due to two factors. We are never that far off the ground so the impacts are smaller, and we typically wear a decent amount of protection. Personally I wear a lot of protection, but even some of my 529 team mates who do not wear a whole lot of protection, still wear a helmet, kneepads, and some body armor when racing downhill.

So Tired of Zombies

2010-11-13T00:50:00.001-08:00

Went to Portland. Walked around Powell’s bookstore. Saw way too many books about Zombies. My theory is that a zombie outbreak is near and that the government is preparing us to deal with it through mainstream culture propaganda. And my opinion is that if you don’t know how to deal with zombies by now, its your own fault. Now stop publishing the manuals already.

For reference:Destroy their heads. It does not make sense that mindless creatures die when their heads are destroyed, but that is the rule. Shoot them in the head, chop it off, cleave it, or burn them whole.

Bring machete, stakes, hammer, and guns. Shotguns are preferable, hand guns require more precision and you will be under stress. Eventually you will run out of ammunition and that is where the machete and stakes + hammer come into play. You want to rely on the machete to chop heads off or in rare but lucky cases where you are on the other side of a wire fence, use the stakes + hammer to execute the zombies.

Last word of advice: don’t get bitten, and don’t get sentimental. If your loved ones gets bitten, they are dead. Kill them. Unless the invasion is Haitian zombies there is most likely no cure. Haitian zombies can get cured by killing the witch doctor. If you feel lucky and think its an epidemic, tie your loved ones down really really really well and leave them. Survive, find a cure, survive some more, and cure them.

Now before you go any further, make sure to read up on Vampires and Werewolves. Same theory, same opinion.

Office on Windows Live

2010-10-26T21:54:00.001-07:00

I am impressed. Genuinely and profoundly impressed. The Office integration into Windows live is solid. Read all about it here: http://www.windowslive.com/Connect/Post/d3371a41-150b-4a5f-ac19-f5fbc045b472?ocid=WI_CL_12152

Yes, I work for Microsoft and specifically in Office but rest assured that as a true MS employee I am probably more critical of MS than anyone on the outside. Given how much people dislike Microsoft I am very hesitant to call something great unless I seriously believe I would think the same did I not work for the company.

Office on Windows live is solid and very cool. The editors are great. Being able to share and edit a OneNote with friends is fantastic. I am going to use this a whole lot.

Enjoy

1,2, or 1.5 languages?

2010-10-23T00:23:00.001-07:00

Friend of mine recently told me he admired my ability to switch between languages without notice. He is American. I don’t find switching languages, sometimes mid sentence, to be strange. I am not American.

The interesting thing to me is not the ability to speak more than one language or being able to mix, but that some phrases always are said in your non-native language. Like the word “nice” being adopted in Danish: “Det er for nice” –> “It’s too nice” –> “it’s awesome”.

For a lot of the world that is our current language. A mixed bag. BUt it’s not new. There is a reason there are so many French words in English (magnificent, marvelous)

This Korean pop video illustrates how a lot of us non-Americans think and speak.

2NE1 - CAN'T NOBODY [HD]

Great Video Experiment

2010-10-18T23:03:00.001-07:00

Go to http://www.thewildernessdowntown.com/ and spend 3 minutes. When they ask you for the address of the place you grew up, provide it.

I haven’t been back for years and it was amazing to see my childhood town incorporated into the video.

I think that is one of the better ways to draw in people I have seen in a long while.

I think I might watch it again.

Sway: The Irresistible Pull of Irrational Behavior

2010-06-30T22:12:00.001-07:00

Sway is a great book not unlike Dan Ariely’s Predictably Irrational. It further details that we are irrational beings and I cannot help but like the book because it affirms me in my long held beliefs. Yes, like most other people, I listen more to opinions which I already agree with, than with opinions that I don’t agree with. The entire news industry is based on that behavior. The authors of Sway call that the diagnosis bias.

The three main topics covered in the book are Loss aversion, Value Attribution, and Diagnosis bias.

Loss Aversion

We value what we have more than what we could get. If the price of eggs go up the sales fall 2.5 times as much as the sales would increase with a comparatively fall in price.

Value Attribution

We imbue objects and people with qualities base on first impressions. That is why you want to be well dressed for that job interview.

Diagnosis bias

We label people. Most interestingly, we act our labels. In order to succeed at work, its in your best interest to be labeled a ‘rock star’ because then you will start acting like one. Yes, smiling also makes you happy. At least as much as being happy makes you smile.

Iphone screen broken. Is it more valuable now?

2010-02-06T16:11:00.001-08:00

The day after the ipad was announced, my iphone tried to commit suicide. I synched it with my PC and it decided it was time to start from scratch and would not synch. Instead all content got erased. I had to basically format it and start all over.

Yesterday, my iphone decided it was not enough and leapt out of my hand onto the concrete floor and the screen broke.

The touch screen still works just fine although you can feel the seams as you use it

I am at Interactions10 in Savannah, GA and had been to two great talks about how our relationship with objects change over time. Richard Banks presented a talk called “The 40 year old tweet” on how we imbue meaning into objects that reminds us of special occasions or periods of our lives and went on to talk about how we also have that relationship with at least some digital objects. Matt Cottam presented a talk on “Heirloom Electronics” in which he discussed how time adds patina to objects and how that seems to make them more valuable to us. Both great talks.

Today I have taken extra special care of my iphone.

I am afraid I might break it more, so I take it out of my pocket more slowly than before. I touch it more gently so I don’t break the screen more.

I have also started to notice new things. Like the button in the middle. It is obviously not part of the glass surface, but I had never thought about that before. Also, the phone has become more a thing in itself. I suddenly look at it differently, it means something new. Before it was just a glittery tecno object with little soul, its only purpose being a portal to the contacts and information made possible by the applications. Now, it draws attention to itself and I look at it without turning it on. Examine it even, and I have begun thinking about other ways to make it more personal. Maybe i will try some acid or some burning on the back of it to see what it can take?

I guess I will try to fix the screen because after all, even though it’s got a lot more personality now, it is no longer able to really serve its original and primary purpose, but if I end up buying a new one, I think I will keep this one around, if for nothing else, as a reminder of my trip to Savannah.

Definition of memorable

2009-08-09T22:42:00.001-07:00

Memorable is the difference between expected experience and actual experience.

Really bad and really good experiences stand out because they were far from what we expected. On the other hand you can used to a lot. Once you have eaten at 5 star restaurants a lot, they stop being special, and if you are a plumber, then things other people would find gross, are just everyday work to you.

Usability does not matter…

2009-07-17T23:30:00.001-07:00

…anymore than Security and Performance

I am not going to ever have another argument about whether usability is important. That is so 1990’ies. I will walk away from every such discussion saving my breath.

I just needed to get this off my chest.

I think we are almost over the “is design important” discussion and soon, hopefully within the next 5 years or so, we will also be over the “does it really matter to establish an emotional connection to people in your product design” question. I am looking forward to that day.

Till then, still lots of convincing to be done.

I hate ‘users’

2009-07-17T23:04:00.001-07:00

Users are Humans, not users. The word ‘user’ is looking at people through a product lens as if their purpose in life is to use that particular product. But users are not users. Users are human beings of flesh and blood who behave in predictably irrational ways, with real goals and dreams and jobs and most importantly of all, with other things going on in their life than using our product.

It can be a bitter pill to swallow when you pour your heart into your work, your oeuvre, the application that will solve these users every need and then being told that your application is less important, a lot less important to these people that you could hope and wish for.

Don’t get me wrong. Not thinking about the people who are going to use your product in some way is just fundamentally wrong. But on the other hand, when we talk about User Centered Design today, it sounds as old fashioned and as inhumane as Business process reengineering.

Do I have an alternative? Sure, it is about building on Don Norman’s concept of activity centered design, having the right understanding of how human works, and Dan Ariely and Dan Lockton both add significantly to that understanding, and then we must talk to actual people who will use actually the product, and we must keep talking to these people throughout the product cycle.

But really, it starts much simpler than that. Instead of saying “what will the users want?” say “what will the people who are going to user our product want?”. It is a small change, just a few more words, but I find it really changes how you think.

All of this may seem a little abstract. A friend of mine pointed me to this Argentinean example of adapting to real people.

Summary: In Argentine Pepsi is pronounced Pecsi by a significant number of people. Pepsi embraces that and launches Pecsi.

I love it. Instead of trying to reinforce the name, they change it to what people call it anyway and play on it.

Useful? yes. Usable? yes. Desirable? not so much…

2009-07-12T21:50:00.001-07:00

Today Seattle Times ran a story on what can only be described as sloppy work by the Seattle street department. See the picture above for an example of a curb that had to be remade three times. The first question that comes to mind is how anyone would walk away from a piece of work like that straight faced. And the second question is how often something similar happens in software products or other products.

The article is an instructional piece on what can go wrong when the culture of a group is mismanaged. But it is also a great piece on when the designers and the crew do not communicate and when neither is willing to give in and listen.

I don’t think a lot of bad code is actually shipped, but I do think there is quite a few products where the various pieces of code fit together about as well as the curb stones in the picture above.

I also think that the Seattle Street department is not the only one marred by designs from less than fully informed designers:

Homeowners couldn't get out of their driveways without scraping the bottom of their cars after a new sidewalk was installed in December 2007 in the 8200 block of Ravenna Avenue Northeast. Bookman said the problem stemmed from poor design. The project designer was a relatively young, new hire who left the department shortly after the work was completed, he said.

Dan Ariely -Predictably Irrational

2009-05-20T23:34:00.001-07:00

I have been wanting to write a book review on Dan Ariely’s excellent book Predictably Irrational for a while now. Instead I will just say that is is a fantastic book that is absolutely worth reading for anyone and especially any designer and link to a few Ted Links.

A blog post on Ted by Dan Ariely about behavioral economics:http://blog.ted.com/2009/05/dan_ariely_2008.php

And two talks that cover some of the fundamentals of the book: http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/dan_ariely_asks_are_we_in_control_of_our_own_decisions.html and http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/dan_ariely_on_our_buggy_moral_code.html

All I can really say is that this book has given me a language to talk about and data to back up my long held skeptics about rationality.

Got 10-40 Servers? Want Free Software?

2009-05-11T14:48:00.001-07:00

Sign up for a 1:1 interview with the System Center Essentials team and receive your choice of a Microsoft product from the available list.

Who?

IT administrators/engineers/managers in mid market
companies with 10-40 servers.

What?

Participate in a 90 minute 1:1 interview with the System
Center essentials team.

How?

E-mail sobitar@microsoft.com or sign up at the Microsoft System Center booth in the orange area in the MT area. Or catch us at Twitter @MS_ITPro_UX

Find us at Teched

2009-05-10T18:40:00.001-07:00

Are you an IT Pro and at TechEd 2009 in LA? Then sign up for our Server & System Center User Interface study

Here is how to find us. We are in the orange section of the Technical Learning Center. The Technical Learning Center is where all the Microsoft booths are next to the expo.

We are here:

Go the left when you come in towards the orange section

And find Christian. I will most likely wear a white Microsoft t-shirt.

The back of the T-shirt says “@MS_ITPro_UX” which is the twitter name we are posting under.

I am always happy to talk, especially about your experience with our Server and System Center products, so if you see me, come chat.

Are you an IT Pro and at TechEd 2009 in LA?

2009-05-05T11:08:00.000-07:00

Help make Windows Server and System Center products better. Participate in this study at TechEd, help us, and get a little gift of appreciation.

Where & When
TechEd in LA May 11-15th

Location Update: please see Find us at Teched

How long will it take
This will take about an hour. Since we are scheduling this add-hoc, we have many open spots and at the time of day that suits you. Contact us (see below) and let’s set something up.

Why
In order to make the best possible products for managing IT infrastructure it is crucial that we understand how you work in real life, what the real scenarios are, and where you want to go with your systems and processes. This particular activity is about impacting the future versions of Windows Server and System Center. It is about getting the common 'stuff' right and we need your help.

Who are we
We are User Researchers and User Experience Designers from Microsoft who work on Windows Server and on System Center products. We are currently working on WS2008 R2, SCE, SCCM, Service Manager and other similar products.

How to sign up
Most communication of this will happen via twitter @MS_ITPro_UX. You can sign up with either of the following tweets:

@MS_ITPro_UX TechEd study. Interested, contact me at TechED

@MS_ITPro_UX TechEd study. Interested, contact me at TechED. Monday, Tuesday, Thursday

The latter means those are the days you are most likely to be available. You can also give us a time you would like.

You can also contact us on email: chagelsr AT Microsoft DOT com. Please put “TechED Study” in the subject and give us the same information as above. Should we just contact you while at TechEd or is there a specific timeslot you are interested in. We will of course not send your email to anyone else.

You can also just come by the Windows Management Technologies Booth and we will make sure to post where we will be and you can sign up there.

And as a small thank you…
As a thank you for your time we will offer you a piece of Microsoft software. You will be able to select it from a list of pre-selected software. The only caveat is that in order to get the software you have to be a US citizen or have US Social Security Number. This is for Tax purposes. You are very welcome to sign up for this study without getting the gratuity.

People who influenced how I think about design

2009-05-03T14:10:00.001-07:00

There are a great many people whom have influenced how I think about design but there are two people whom I think have influenced me more than anyone when it comes to what design is rather than how to think about specific problems.

Victor Papanek

Victor Papanek, introduced to me by John Paulin in a class on accessible software, has given me the notion that as designers we have a moral imperative to make the world better.

One story about Papanek that forever changed my thinking is about car bumpers.

In the 1950’ies a lot of people died in traffic accidents due to poorly constructed cars. Someone would drive into a tree and the bumper would just fold and the people in the car would die. Congress held a hearing with the car manufacturers asking them to improve their cars to bring down the death toll. Congress got answers along the lines of “no, can’t do that”, “it is impossible to build a bumper that will withstand more than 15mph for a price that won’t make cars too expensive” and similar explanations playing on congress’ fear of curbing this booming industry. As the congress and industry people were leaving the building, walking down the stairs, a car came driving up on the pavement and slammed front first into the side of the building. Out got the driver, Victor Papanek, unhurt. Congress men stormed over to see this perculiar sight and learned that Papanek had built a bumper of 2 layers of 10 cent cans that could withstand a crash, as it just did, of 25 mph. The congress men turned around, went back into session and were a lot less lenient on the car company representatives.

I haven’t been able to actually verify the story, but nonetheless, it taught me that as designers we should never accept commonly held beliefs and it is our role to show the world what is really possible. We change the world by making and showing.

Donald Schön

For my thesis my professor, Peter Carstensen, suggested I read Donald Schön’s book The Reflective Practitioner. This was a mind opening book that shaped how I have come to think about design as an activity. We learn by having what Schön calls a ‘dialog with the material’ a phrase I have adopted and used many times to describe the design process.

In design we do not just iterate. We step into the problem and work in the problem, then we step out to gain perspective, challenge the problem and our assumptions and then step into the problem again with a fresh perspective and work in a changed direction. This is also why the practice of design crit is so fundamental to design. It is a help from peers to pull you out of the inner workings of a design to gain a new perspective, new insight about the problem before you dive back into the glory guts of the details.

The Substance of Style

2009-04-25T20:55:00.001-07:00

This is really for another post, but it all started with Claudia Kotchak’s talk on bringing design into the DNA of Proctor and Gamble. In that talk Kotchak mentions Virginia Postrel’s book The Substance of Style. I just finished reading it and I highly recommend it. It is a fairly easy read, I mostly read it on the subway while on vacation in New York, and it is thought provoking. How you will be provoked depends on where you are coming from I suppose.

Being a designer, I wasn’t provoked by the claim that there is value in style and that surface sells. I really didn’t get provoked until the sixth and final chapter in which Virginia Postrel pre-empted my criticism of the book stating that instead of telling the world how much more design is than mere style, designers should take pride in providing value through surface modifications. It is on page 178 in the paper back. I have still not quite accepted that statement…

Honestly, I had a really hard time getting through chapter 1, chapter 2 was only a little better and it wasn’t really till chapter 4 that I felt I was actually learning something. But that may be because I really did not need convincing that design makes sense.

What the book really gave me was a language to talk about the changes from earlier periods of one style to rule them all to a modern day notion of a multitude of equally valid styles.

The book also provided me a lot of good food for thought on what design mean to identity. This is something I have been thinking quite a bit about recently and Postrel terms it well in talking about going from “I like that” to “I am like that” i.e. the style of the objects you surround yourself with are used to express who you are and what you aspire to.

Chapter 4 and 5 were probably my favorite chapters. Chapter 4 deals with the Boundaries of Design and covers issues such as city planning, committees that determine design with or without an agenda. Both are bad.

Chapter 5 is about being Smart & Pretty and how the two are combined, raising the bar for entry into any category. This is something I personally work with everyday, talking about how all applications / websites are dated i.e. presents a thinking from a given area. If for instance you produce an application that today that looks like Outlook 2003 then you are simply not meeting the barrier to entry for a modern day application.

One favorite quote from chapter 5 is

Aesthetics is pre-rational or nonrational, not irrational or antirational. (p. 171)

I think I will use that quote in a conversation soon :)

Chapter 5 also covers the cost of aesthetics and goes on to state that the (sad?) truth is that aesthetics is not often not about making more money anymore, but about staying in business. It is not an added and valued extra, but a requirement. I suppose this really only is sad if you are a designer and you thought you main value add was in style. (see, I can’t let go of that notion).

A little criticism

It does seem to me that Postrel tips over into the too post-modernist camp and states that because there is no one style that everyone follows, then everyone has many styles. I simply do not buy that. Everyone has one major style or maybe a public/work style and a private style and of course there are times when our style is adopted to the situation for instance when we attend formal events such as funerals or weddings.

But it is worth reading, and funny

The book is filled with interesting examples. One funny example is the about the cultural context of something as simple as a color. Today blue is associated with business, but in ancient Rome it was the color of weakness and in the twelfth-century France it was the color of the monarchy. (pp 94-95).

And if you want to learn more

If you want to learn more, visit Virginia Postrel's website, read about the book:The Substance of Style. Or spend 17 minutes on this TED2004 talk on Glamour, also by Virginia Postrel.

All references are to the paperback. On Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/Substance-Style-Aesthetic-Remaking-Consciousness/dp/0060933852

Filtering in Active Directory Administrative Center

2009-04-25T16:41:00.001-07:00

This is the post I have wanted to write for a long time. I had to wait until the designs had been shown in public (see bottom of this post). This is also the latest in a series on filter designs.

Let’s get back to our original goal of…

…making a filtering mechanism that works well for the majority of cases. ‘Works well’ means that it is easy to use and complete enough to cover 95% of the scenarios of the people who use our products. Getting deep on Filtering

We have looked at a number of different examples of Attribute based filtering and we need something that is as good as the Zune filter yet is much more scalable.

Enter the design for Active Directory Administrative Center. This is the application in all it simple might and glory once you have navigated to a folder (called Organizational Unit in Active Directory) full of user accounts.

In the following screens we will focus in on the list area:

A: Title. Tells you the name of the folder and number of items in the folder or the number of items in the filter
B: Free text filter. Filters across most attributes
C: Add criteria button. Lets you add rules or attributes to your query
D: Saved queries.
E: Button for saving the current filter.

If you type in the free-text filter we filter the list as you type and update the title with (“number of matching records” of “total number of records”):

We also change the background color to indicate that the list is filtered. Hit ESC to clear the free-text filter. CTRL+E will set focus on the free-text filter.

We added the free-text filter because most times you can get by with a quick search even when you have a couple of thousand records in a given folder. If you have more than a couple of thousand records you may need more advanced filtering. The ‘Add criteria button’ provides a set of rules (see Different kinds of Filtering) and a list of attributes to filter on. Active Directory Administrative Center lets you filter on about 20 attributes. From a pure design point of view that number could be much bigger. From this applications’ perspective, we went through rounds of user testing to figure out what the right attributes were to include and it did simply not make sense to include all 150 or so attributes.

We added the idea of rules for two reasons. First of they are a helping hand in what we expect a lot of people to be filtering on all the time such as for instance “users with disabled/enabled accounts” which is really just a shortcut for “Object type = user AND Account state = disabled/enabled”. Rules can also be a way to package a filter that would otherwise not be possible to make with this design. More on that later.

The ‘Add criteria button’:

As soon as we add the ‘users with disabled/enabled accounts’ rule the filter is updated.

To get the enabled accounts, simply click on the link “disabled” and you will get a dropdown with possible values. And we could of course have added more than one rule and several attributes. Here is just one more attribute:

Notice the ‘and’ in the beginning of each line? We automatically AND the free-text filter and the rules and attributes together. this gets us to the core of this filter design:

Criteria on different attributes are AND’ed and Criteria on the same attribute are OR’ed.

Here is an example of this design rationale in effect:

In the example above we have created a filter for

((Name starts with ‘t’) OR (Name starts with ‘a’)) AND (Type = User) AND (Free-text contains ‘hund’)

We do not allow you change the Boolean operators, and we do not allow you change the attribute once it has been added. you can remove a criteria (click the red x) and add new attributes. We do not allow you change the Boolean operators or change the attribute because that way we can take care of grouping automatically and prevent filters where you get the too much due to wrongly grouped ORs (the Cartesian product) or nothing at all due to wrongly placed ANDs.

On one hand we have avoided the raw Boolean logic exposed in products such as Winamp which we know most people have a really hard time getting right, and on the other hand we have avoided jumping through hoops as Itunes does or created a design that is inherently limited as Zune has done.

We also have created a design that can take care of about 95% of the scenarios. And if 95% is too little there is room to improve it through rules that target special cases where a set of criteria across different attributes should be OR’ed. We don’t ship any of those in Active Directory Administrative Center. We could not come up with any even through extensive user testing.

What about the last 5%?

The Active Directory team has put a lot of effort into PowerShell in Windows Server 2008 R2 so if you need a really advanced filter you can always go to command line. The alternative would be to make a GUI design that covers all cases, but honestly, I don’t believe we could do that and still keep it usable. This is a trade-off, but by not designing for all edge cases we also don’t pollute the experience for the majority of people using the application.

A little more on this specific Design

I am sure you could implement the core design idea differently and still get a great design. The following covers some specific choices we made for this implementation of the idea.

To get the query shown above we first selected Name and Type

…and then added Name again…

The new criteria is inserted under the existing criteria for Name and indented and OR’ed.

This may seem like a round-about way of adding the same attribute twice, but we chose to do it this first of all because we believe most filters will only use the same attribute once, and second because this allows us to insert the second instance of an attribute at the right spot and hence both take care of grouping and get it to visually line up without having to move criteria around after you have already interacted with them.

If you are an Active Directory admin you may very well be working across multiple domains. If you have 2 domains, say ‘Corp’ and ‘Sub’ and you want to find users with expired accounts in the User OU of either domain, you can create the query anywhere, save it and reapply it in a different OU:

I hope you have enjoyed reading about filtering as much as I have enjoyed designing for it and writing about it and if you have comments or questions, please leave them here or catch me at Twitter @rulerbreaker.

Credits

Like all other designs this was a team effort. A lot of people from our UX team (Twitter @MS_ITPro_UX) have contributed and it should go without saying that so have the great Program Mangers, Developers, and Testers who have worked on this.

Active Directory Administrative Center will ship as part of Windows Server 2008 R2 which means it is not out yet but has been presented at TEC and will also be touched upon at TechEd 2009 (session SIA326 “What Windows Server 2008 R2 Does for Your Active Directory”).

Social trails

2009-04-10T19:27:00.001-07:00

Don Norman talks about how we in the real world use the actions of others to find our own way. He has used exampels such as seeing people waiting on the train means that the train has not arrived yet, or that a path through some grass being an indication of a need for a path there. Very interesting and insightful, but I can't help but wonder if maybe it applies less to software. I think that in software, at least ideally, we look at what people really do and then change the application to fit their workflow.

What I am really trying to understand is if it is better to build trails ofbither people into software, or if it makes more sense to just change the software.

There are probably cases for both approaches.

Zune –on Filtering

2009-03-14T13:21:00.001-07:00

Zune has, in my opinion, nailed the core insight in attribute based filtering: Criteria on the same attribute should be OR’ed and criteria on different attributes should be AND’ed.

There is no mentioning of AND or OR In the Zune autoplaylist UI. You also do not have to select between ANY or ALL as you do in ITunes. It is simply all built in and just works the way you would expect it to work.

Zune’s autoplaylist has two defining characteristics. First, there is a predefined set of attributes you can filter on. You cannot add additional attributes which means Zune does not need to expose groupings. Second, the dropdowns used to pick values to filter on automatically makes the ORs between the values.

Below is a screenshot of the dropdown. When picking what album artist to filter on, you can pick multiple entries from the list.

Here I have picked NOFX and the dropdown has added a semicolon to indicate that more can be added. Similar to typing in email addresses.

You can also just type text in the dropdown which is the same as a ‘contains’ operator.

Above we have created our example from previous posts:

(Album artist name is NOFX OR Offspring OR contains ‘Bad’) AND rating is Like

When it comes to music players, I think the Zune autoplaylist UI is the best i have ever used. The only reason to not just copy it is really that its strength is also its weakness. It cannot be expanded to include a lot more attributes.

Next we will finally look at the filter in Active Directory Administrative Center.

ITunes –on Filtering

2009-03-12T22:43:00.001-07:00

ITunes, another media player, another attribute based filtering mechanism for dynamic playlists. And another solution to how you let people create complicated queries yet hide the complexity.

The Smart playlist UI in ITunes starts out much like other players letting you pick an attribute, operator, and type or pick an operand.

ITunes is different form other players however when you add more than one criteria. The top part of the dialog changes from “match the following rule” to “Match all/any the following rules” wich is of course shorthand for “AND all the rules together” or “OR all the rules together”.

Assume we saved the playlist in the above picture as “All music above 1 or 2”. It would simply show us every song in our library not rated either 1 or 2 including unrated songs. Useful, but a little broad.

If we want to create a playlist of all Metal that is either unrated or rated above 2 stars we could not do that with matching either ALL or ANY of the criteria. If we chose all we would ask to skip songs that were rated both 1 and 2 stars and were of the genre Metal. Clearly an empty list because a song cannot be rated both 1 and 2. If on the other hand we OR them all together we would get all music because songs rated 1 would not be rated 2 and the other way around.

To overcome this problem without compromising the simplicity of the UI ITunes has introduced one of my favorite features when it comes to filtering in media players: The ability to use a playlist as a criteria in another playlist:

This is a bit of a crazy feature, but very cool once you understand it. Each playlist essentially works as a reusable group of criteria which allows us to get our Metal playlist without the songs we have rated 1 or 2 stars:

I would expect people to object to this idea of reusable playlists as being a strange or silly solution to the problem and I would not be surprised if someone brought forth the argument that it is convoluted and that there must be a better solution.

I personally think it is elegant and powerful. And useful in enterprise scenarios. Imagine that you were running a campaign targeting large companies in different countries. In Denmark a large company may be defined as one with more than 5.000 employees while large in the US may be defined as companies with at least 15.000 employees. With reusable criteria you could define “large Danish companies” and “large US companies” as separate playlists and reuse them in queries about your past sales, you current open orders, overdue invoices and so forth.

What’s next?

Next up is Zune. A limited/focused solution (pick your point of view) that in my mind is the most elegant solution so far.

Playlists in Windows Media Player –on Filtering

2009-03-12T21:23:00.001-07:00

Like other media players, Windows Media player has an auto Playlist feature. WMP has also realized that providing people with raw access to Boolean logic will usually not resolve in a good experience and so has opted for a solution where it is very clear and easy how to add criteria, but as we shall see, it breaks down quickly if we try to create our example from WinAmp.

When we create an auto playlist we get this screen…

and when we click on the green plus sign we get the standard 3 step filter design of

Pick an attribute
Pick an operator
Write or pick an operand

If you want to make a playlist for a band or a genre this works brilliantly. It is very easy to create for instance the playlist you can see below of “All songs by Goldfinger where my rating is at least 3 stars”.

If, however, we were to create the same playlist as in the WinAmp example:

Artist is (NOFX OR Offspring) and Rating is at least 3

we would get in trouble. Windows Media Player ANDs everything within a group together. In the following example I wanted to make a playlist for Punk and Jazz rated at least 3 stars, but because the Genres are AND’ed the result will alwyas be an empty playlist because a song cannot be both Jazz and punk i.e. it cannot have two genres.

Because every criteria within a group is AND’ed you must repeat common criteria across groups to get the expected result. Below I had to add the criteria for rating to both Punk and Jazz. Had I only added it to Punk the result would have been “Punk rated at least 3 stars and all Jazz” which is not what we want.

What’s next?

Next we will look at ITunes and its interesting tricks and after that we will look at Zune and finally we will take a look at the Attribute based filtering in Windows Server 2008 R2 Active Directory Administrative Center.

Would you buy a car from Chevy right now?

2009-03-03T21:34:00.001-08:00

Does good UI mean anything for business software? The people who will make the purchase decision usually aren’t the people who will actually use the software, so even though, for the end-user, the interface is the system it should not matter to the people with the money.

Of course you can talk about TCO, about the time it takes to train people, and how enjoyment of work leads to more productive people. But at the end of the day, I think what really matters, is that the people who are about to shell out a substantial amount of money can see that you, the seller, cares and is investing in the software.

This was brought up by a friend of mine from a different product group. They have recently released a completely revamped product. New backend, new UI, some new functionality. My friend said that the experience selling this product is substantially different form the other products form the same division. First of all, the UI looks new and modern and people want to like it. Once they have gone through the rest of the system and everything checks out to be modern and have a future, the buyers get really excited. They can see that we are investing in the product and that gives them confidence.

Which leads me to the car analogy. Chevy does not have a good track record on quality, but the newest version of the Malibu has received very positive feedback. Yet, I am not sure I would personally buy a Chevy car. Not because the individual car may not be of high quality, but because the overall system that it is a part of is not sound. I honestly don’t know if Chevy is going to be around to honor the guarantee or supply spare parts. I have lost faith in the company more so than in the product.

I think something similar is at stake in business software. The product may be technically great or the UI may look spiffy, but unless you can show how you are investing in both and that you are prepared to keep investing, I don’t think you have a compelling case.

Now, please do not think that I don’t think the UI should work well, but just look great, of course it should be great. I actually believe in the TCO, training, and enjoyment arguments above, but the first usage of the UI is not when people start using the software, but on the box or in the sales situation.

A First Look at the Active Directory Administrative Center in the Windows Server 2008 R2 Beta

2009-03-03T00:03:00.001-08:00

When you don’t work on web sites but on installed software and on top on that on software that is really specialized it can be hard to convey what you are working on to family and peers, but here at least is a review of the almost finished version of Active Directory Administrative Center. This software is part of Windows Server 2008 R2 and the screenshots are form the beta version.

Being somewhat past the Beta version internally and moving steadily towards the finishing line, it was fun to see the Beta version again and see that the version we will be shipping will be even more solid. Yep, lots of little things changed since Beta. Nothing major.

The pictures are in the bane of my existence, namely the Windows Classic look which is hideously ugly and unbelievably hard to design for. Some day I will share some war stories about that and share some tools I have made to make life a little easier.

Enjoy: John Policelli’s Blog » Blog Archive » A First Look at the Active Directory Administrative Center in the Windows Server 2008 R2 Beta

Playlists in WinAmp –On Filtering

2009-03-01T23:59:00.001-08:00

WinAmp provides a typical attribute based filtering mechanism for creating smart playlists. But instead of just starting you off on your own, WinAmp does include a set of pre-canned queries that can help get you started.

If however, we dive into the custom filtering we get the standard 3 step filter design of

Pick an attribute
Pick an operator
Write an operand

And we get to put AND’s and OR’s between the criteria. Lovely.

In the above example the default OR will get us all Metal regardless of rating, all music rated at least 3 and all music from artists such as Manowar beginning with ‘Man’. That is a pretty broad playlist :)

The Advanced Mode

As with most old school attribute based filtering designs there is an advanced mode that lets you just plainly type a query into a textbox complete with its own syntax and all the other goodness that can be pulled out of the database.

The Query Builder

To help you compose the query WinAmp even has a query builder that has some interesting properties.

Lets create the a playlist that gives us songs by NOFX, Offspring or Bad Religion that are rated 3 or more.

First we create the criteria for NOFX

and then we add '”Off” and OR it to the previous criteria

which will interestingly put a set of parenthesis around the two criteria.

As you add another criteria with OR WinAmp will add yet another grouping making it

(((A has NOFX) OR (A has Off)) OR (A has Bad)

which is equivalent to

((A has NOFX) OR (A has Off) OR (A has Bad))

However, when you AND a criteria WinAmp does not add a grouping

What works and what doesn’t work?

Ultimately we are going to see that for most filters it makes sense to OR and group criteria on the same attribute and AND criteria for different attributes. In other words, as long as we know what we are doing and are doing it sequentially, WinAmp does the right thing. As long as we are making criteria for Albumartist and we are OR’ing them together, WinAmp is right in grouping them. And when add a criteria from another attribute, in this case rating, and AND it to the query it should not be grouped in with the previous criteria.

If however we added NOFX and Offspring first, then AND’ed the rating of 3 and then finally OR’ed Bad Religion we would get

((NOFX OR Offspring) AND rating =< 3) OR (Bad Religion)

Which would include all songs by Bad Religion and not only the 3 or above rated songs. To change that we would have to remove the grouping around the rating and the first two artists.

The templates in the first screenshot like ‘recently played’, ‘Audio by genre’ or ‘60’ies music’ are also good ways of circumventing the fundamental problem with this design namely that you really need to know what you are doing in order to use it properly. And when all is said and done, I quite frankly find the automatic grouping more help in the advanced version than the lack of grouping in the supposedly simple version.

The only truly great thing about this design is that it is easy to share a smart playlist with a friend or on your blog by simply copying the full string. This kind of easy sharing is something that most filter solutions should include.

What’s next?

Next we will be looking at the query interfaces of Windows Media Player, Itunes, and Zune. All three have worked hard on the usability of their solutions and I think there are some mistakes worth learning from in Windows Media Player, some interesting ideas in Itunes and some great things to copy from Zune.

No, it is not ok!

2009-03-01T10:15:00.001-08:00

I hate error messages that just state the fact and then give you a single ok button. Like on the IPhone, I try to read mail, it cannot connect and it comes back with the message: “Cannot get mail” and provides me with a single choice: “Ok”.

No, it is not ok. You did not do you job you little piece of no good junk. I would feel much better if it would provide me with a way to rate its performance so I could get the frustration of my chest. I would be much happier if it gave me three buttons:

[Do it again and be thrown out]
[We’ll let it slip this time]
and [It is Ok for now]

Yes, much happier.

Different kinds of Filtering

2009-02-28T21:26:00.001-08:00

This is the third post about filtering. In this post we will look at different kinds of filtering.

Filtering is usually a good way to help people work with large data sets and depending on the kind of data and the goal there are at least the following kinds of filtering:

Indexing

Indexing such as tag clouds or alphanumeric filtering can be used as a simple way for people to narrow down the data set to a more manageable chunk and to help people focus on what they are interested in. Indexing is defined as only allowing you to filter by one tag/letter and is only really useful if people already know something about the data or what the tag/indexer means.

Multiple Tag Filtering

In Multiple Tag filtering you get to select more than one tag to narrow down the result set. Del.icio.us provides a great example of this kind of filtering:

There is always an implied AND between the tags meaning that only results that have all the chosen tags will be shown. Del.icio.us implementation where you can remove any tag from your filter lends itself well to exploration of the data. In the above example for instance you could remove ‘ux’ and the explore what other topics there are articles about.

Faceted Navigation

Faceted navigation is one of my own personal favorite kinds of filtering because it encourages exploration and does not require you to know the data very well beforehand. To get faceted search to work it is crucial that the facets are only showing existing data i.e. if you are searching for MP3 players the price ranges should be derived from the actual price ranges and not let you select $1000 when the top price is under $500 (yes, seriously, $500).

Though it is a best practice to only show criteria that will lead to results you could get faceted search to work with links to empty results as long as you can predict the possible links. In other words, if you know that the display size for MP3 players come in 1.0”, 1.8”, 1.9” and so on and you don’t currently have any with 1.9” in stock you could still include the link and let people save that query as an agent, but you should not include 1.1”, 1.2” and so on, just because that is the logical numbering. In other words you should never allow people to get to a meaningless query.

The strength of faceted navigation is also its weakness. In domains where you don’t know the possible data values which is often the case in for instance computer management, you need a way to allow people to search for possible rather than actual values.

Attribute Based Filtering

Attribute Based Filtering is in its raw form really easy to program, because it really just exposes the database, and is hence seen in way too many applications. It is also really hard to make usable because it normally requires people to not only know the data but also understand AND, OR, and groupings. Having seen enough Development Mangers get Boolean queries wrong in Microsoft’s bug database has let me to believe that there really is no reason to expose the horrors of Boolean logic to anyone but maybe programmers.

Interestingly attribute based filtering is the defacto standard way of making auto playlists in all the media players I have used. In many ways, I think this is a bit lazy and that those applications should really work towards faceted navigation based on your music collection. When I say ‘lazy’ it is because faceted navigation not only requires a design, but also that the application constantly monitors the data set and creates the facets. That requires a lot of programming.

From a design perspective, making faceted navigation work also requires a way to OR criteria together that is typically absent i.e. Artist is Dire Straits OR Mark Knopfler. Normally you would only be able to pick one facet from each category but to get playlist to be really valuable you want to be able to pick more than one genre or artist.

Rule Based Filtering

Rule Based filtering is best known from Microsoft Outlook and is a way of making attribute based filtering easier. Essentially rules are pre-made queries where people are only asked to fill out the operands.

If you for instance create a rule like: “with specific words in the subject” this gets translated to “with Word1 OR Word2 or Wordn in the subject” which means you cannot change the logic, the attributes or the operators.

Rule based filtering is both usable and powerful because it takes away much of the complexity of writing queries by pre-packaging the most likely used queries in the right format and can cover a large set of different cases. There will however always be cases that the pre-canned rules do not cover and for that you typically need attribute based queries.

Next we will dive into some existing implementations of attribute based filtering.

Getting deep on Filtering

2009-02-28T21:04:00.001-08:00

This is the second post in a series on filtering. This is really getting into the gory details of filtering and may seem a little dry. Skip it if it bores you.

Terms and Definitions

Search: you start with nothing and get something
- Think of web search. You start with a blank screen and get some results back
Filter: You start with something and get less
- You have a full collection of music. By setting up a criteria you will see less than everything
Find: You start with something and move around in it
- Try it in Word or in your browser. You find the first instance of your search string but you can still see the rest of the document.

Attributes, Operators and operands

‘Artist equals NOFX’ follows the normal pattern for a filter criterion on songs. When we break it down into pieces we will use the following terms:

· Attribute: Artist is an attribute just as Rating, Play count, and Release Year

· Operator: Equals is the operator. Typically filter criteria uses operators such as Contains, equals, above, below, and between.

· Operand: In the example above, ‘NOFX’ is the operand. Operand is just a fancy word for the value(s) we want to operate on.

Boolean filtering

At the end of the day, filtering is really about finding the right subset of data, and if you want to get in deep, you should read up on set theory. For this discussion that will not be necessary though. We don’t really care about mathematics and what people could possibly do, we care about making a filtering mechanism that works well for the majority of cases. ‘Works well’ means that it is easy to use and complete enough to cover 95% of the scenarios of the people who use our products.

You will nonetheless need to understand a little about AND, OR and grouping.

If you have a basket of apples, some green, some red, and those apples are of different sizes and weight, you can subdivide the apples into smaller groups by those properties. You could for instance pick up only green apples, or only red apples that are larger than a tennis ball. To express the criteria by which you picked the apples, the latter could be expressed as

Color is ‘red’ AND size = Larger than tennis ball.

Now say you weren’t looking at apples but bell peppers. They come in small, medium, and large and in Green, Yellow, Orange, and Red. Now if you are like me, you prefer small green ones. But if you are more colorful you may like yellow, orange, red in medium and large. To get those you would use the criteria:

Color is Yellow, Color is Orange, Color is Red, Size is Medium, Size is large.

Now, without any additional information about which information goes together you have effectively used an OR

Color is Yellow OR Color is Orange OR Color is Red OR Size is Medium OR Size is large.

and may end up with Small Yellows or Medium Greens. Actually, the only kind you will not end up with are small green ones, which is good because those would then be left for me :) but you clearly got more than what you intended.

However, if you only use AND you not get any bell peppers at all, clearly also not what you intended.

Color is Yellow AND Color is Orange AND Color is Red AND Size is Medium AND Size is large.

What you want is a mix of AND and OR with some parenthesis to demarcate which pieces goes together

(Color is Yellow OR Color is Orange OR Color is Red) AND (Size is Medium OR Size is large).

With this criteria in place we have the foundation for all the filtering we need. If you look closer at it you will see that we have OR between all criteria for the same attribute, parenthesis around all the criteria that is related to the same attribute and AND between parenthesis. This is a core concept which we will dive much more into once we get to the Active Directory Administrative Center filtering: Criteria on the same attribute are OR’ed together and grouped, Criteria on different attributes are AND’ed

Next we will look at different kinds of filtering and after that we will look at some product examples.

On Filtering

2009-02-28T20:55:00.001-08:00

I have worked quite a bit with filtering over the past couple of years and I just happen to be an obsessive filterer when it comes to my music collection. As in I rarely listen to a specific album or artist but to playlists that are made up of genres, rating and so forth.

This will be the first post in a series on filtering. My main goal is to explain a recent design of an attribute based filtering I have been part of for Windows Server 2008 R2 Active Directory Administrative Center –lovely short name, ain’t it ;-)

First however, I think we should talk a little about filtering in general, the different kinds of filtering, some different implementations of query based filtering and then we will get to the AD Administrative Center design and why we designed it the way we did.

Why Filtering

If you boil it down to the core we only really deal with a few questions in UI design. ‘Find stuff’ and ‘deal with stuff’. Both gets more and more exaggerated as there is more and more stuff and the stuff becomes more and more complex. My music collection is some 10.000 songs and that is not even considered large by today’s standards, and each song has so much meta-data that the traditional windows property pages crumble under the weight. Now try managing a data center, or try to look at events, or figure out the meta-data on an AD object and the music example will seem trivial in comparison.

But music makes good example data for talking about filtering because it has built in natural groupings such as artist, album, year, and genre, and most music players allow you to add to that meta-data with for example ratings or moods. In that way music has many of the same characteristics of the data we deal with in the IT management space.

I split my music into Indie Rock, Alternative Rock, Y’alternative, Hard Rock etc. and make playlists with criteria like

Hard rock, Heavy Rock, Alternative, unrated or with a rating over 3 and not marked for not playing.

If we write that out it becomes

Genre = Hard rock OR Heavy Rock OR Alternative
AND Rating is above 3 OR Rating is empty
AND Comments does not contain ‘don’t play’

This query is not unlike queries we will find in the IT management space, in ERP, or anywhere else where we are dealing with large data sets of structured data.

Next, let’s discuss the details of filtering and Boolean logic (Getting deep on filtering) or you can skip that if you know the stuff or really don’t care and go straight to the different kinds of filtering.

A Good Time to Quit?

2009-02-26T23:08:00.001-08:00

We just got a new person on our team. He had been at Microsoft before but quite some years ago to go travel fro a couple of years. Now travelling had become tiresome and he wanted to settle down again for a bit and so got back to work.

Got me thinking… is now really the perfect time to quit and go travelling or work on a new business idea? At least assuming you have the funds, or should you wait? Think about it. Everything is cheaper right now. Airfares are dirt cheap as the carriers are desperate for business, hotels are dying for business, and stores seem to be inventing new anniversaries that can give them an excuse for a sale. Maybe now is the best time in years to quit for a while enjoy life and then get back to work when the economy is picking up again.

It is you, not me… A Great Ted talk

2009-02-12T12:59:00.001-08:00

http://www.ted.com/talks/elizabeth_gilbert_on_genius.html

There is nothing scarier than the beginning of a creative process where the canvas is blank and everything is possible. Will you succeed again, will you deliver the desired outcome? Elizabeth Gilbert talks about Muses or similar concepts. Before the renaissance, people believed that creativity came from without, not within. From Muses, genies, spirits. That takes the pressure off you and puts it onto an external force. I like that idea. I also think it has a lot to do with the environment you are in, the people you are working with and so forth. But then again, you could think about those as the spirits :)

10 Most Common Misconceptions About User Experience Design

2009-01-09T14:55:00.001-08:00

Sometimes you stumble upon a brilliant book or article where you think “well, they said everything I had to say and probably better”. This article: http://mashable.com/2009/01/09/user-experience-design/#comment-11384681 gave me that experience.

It lists the top 10 misconceptions of UX from ‘UX is user interface design’ over ‘UX is just about the user’ to ‘UX a choice’. If I could add an 11^th misconception I would add “UX is about tools”.

People often htink that because you are a designer you must be great at Photoshop or that if you are great at Photoshop, you can be a designer.

It is short, maybe even too short, but really worth the read.

Sometimes you still need locally installed apps

2008-12-30T10:18:00.001-08:00

The internet was down yesterday. At least our local version of it. I have installed some cool AIR applications recently, one of them Kuler from Adobe, and I was working in Photoshop when the internet exhaled. Did not disturb my work, but I did want to get some colors and opened the Kuler AIR app… No luck with that. It just goes to show that there is still a need for off-line scenarios. Despite this being written in a ‘Discount Tires’ waiting room. I appreciate them having internet.

Getting back into the Web

2008-12-25T17:22:00.001-08:00

Years ago when I started getting into computers more seriously I picked up PHP as my first programming language. I chose PHP because it allowed me to make more interesting UI. Obviously I used HTML on the front end.

Then I began working for Microsoft making software for Windows and I needed a new tool to prototype and play with and dived in to C# and WinForms. With Visual Studio intellisense C# was almost as easy as PHP and while I still think PHP has about the best online documentation and built-in functionality, learning C# was quite easy. Later came WPF which still uses C# for the functionality but XAML for the front end. That is what I have had fun with for the past couple of years.

But I can feel it is time to back into the web again. Either through web development or just using some of the great services that has popped up over the past couple of years. Now, I am a bit rusty on what is going on in the web world so these lists from ReadWriteWeb.com are really great introductions. I am in no position to say argue whether the right products are on the list or not, but the lists have provided me with a lot of starting pointers.

-Christian

Victor Papanek

2008-10-14T16:10:00.000-07:00

Fast Company’s article on Building a Sustainable Design Community – Article on Valarie Casey and her challenge to the design world known as the “Kyoto Treaty of Design” got me thinking about my favorite designer; Victor Papanek.

Papanek had a mantra that all designers should contribute to society. As such he spent quite a bit of his career in Africa. He also got the bumper on cars. In the 1950’ies deaths in car crashes were at an all time high. Congress wanted to do something and called a hearing with the car manufactures urging them to put bumpers on cars. But the car manufactures fought back claiming that a bumper that could sustain even 10 mph would make the car so expensive that no one would by cars.

The car manufactures won the debate but as people were coming out of the building after the debate Papanek drove a car into the wall of Congress at 25 mps with a bumper built of two layers of tin cans and came away with an unhurt can and unhurt himself. The story goes that congress went straight back into the building and overturned their decisions.

That, to me illustrates what design is about and that is why Victor Papanek is my favorite designer.

The Small Things

2008-10-10T16:53:00.000-07:00

I just bought a Zune. I have waited for a long time to get a Zune, waiting for auto playlists and audiobook support and with version 3.0 audiobook support was finally added. I bought it Monday and Thursday it died on me. Or so I thought. It happened suddenly. No warning. I was listening to music during a workout, turned it off when done and tried to turn it back on when driving home. But it did not turn on again. I thought it was probably just out of battery although it had happened incomprehensible abrupt. When I cam home I plugged it in, but nothing happened, nothing showed me that it was charging. I tried two different cables, and two different computers, but nothing. I was furious. What the beep. Premium price super device broken after just one week, well, less than that.

This morning before taking it to company store, I thought I would just try one more time, and sure enough, when I plugged it in it started charging, the hints on the screen was almost invisible, but it was there. Subdued, dark grey on black, no motion, like someone coming out of a year long coma. After a while it was back to life, started responding to input and finally got its powers back and started syncing wirelessly.

I like drama, on TV, not when interacting with electronic devices. As good as it feels to have brought the Zune back from the dead, it was something I could have lived without and all it would have taken was ‘low on battery’ message and a bright bleep on the screen when I plugged in the power. Too much to ask? Against the dark visual language of the device?

The darkness of the visuals on the device are in stark contrast to the pink that runs through the PC software. But also a good extension. The subdued, under saturated colors used in the PC player works well with the black/grey + bright highlights on the device.

The Zune is full of little well thought out details, many of them enjoyable. Animations for instance run through the entire application and works really well. Except in those cases where you do not use the software as expected. When you are in the collage view and it changes to the next song, the title and album art slides in from the left. Delicious. But, if you are like me and just play your entire collection instead of a single album and start skipping the songs to get to something you want to listen to, the animation really gets in the way. Small? Yes. Noticeable? yes.

Overall I am very happy with my shift from an Ipod to the Zune. The Ipod and Itunes both look dated; From another area when computers where made of grey. The Zune is like when television got color and pictures started moving.

Humans versus Personas

2008-08-31T16:52:00.001-07:00

I try not to use the term ‘user’ anymore. I really strive to not use it. Instead I talk about ‘the people we design for’, or about the ‘people who will use our software’. I think the term ‘user’ implies that these people are defined by using our software and I think that leads us to design for them as if that were true. As a concrete example, every time we talk about designing for the application being maximized to the screen, we commit the hyperbole sin of assuming using our software is all these people do.

The word ‘user’ is also symptomatic of what I don’t like about personas. Personas are made up people and I have a hard time relating to them. I am sure they are made up of real user data, but they are made up from the point of view of someone designing for them and usually make us, the product team, look more important than we probably are.

I like designing for real humans because when all goes well, it helps these people, it has a positive impact on their lives. I think that is the main reason I have a hard time with personas. I can’t impact them, I will never make them have better lives, and they will never call me up or write a blog post about how our product is better than what they had before.

Design as a Process of Becoming

2008-08-31T16:13:00.001-07:00

Donald Schoen calls design is a dialog with the material, a dialog where you shift from immersing yourself in the problem and standing back to get a perspective on your work so far. A sinus curve. In, out, in.

But design is not only a dialog with the material; it is also a dialog with the people whom you design for. A process of on one hand understanding their point of view and on the other applying your point of view to the problem. A process of becoming them, taking on your customer’s point of view as your own. It is true; you should not be designing for yourself. You should strive to become the ones you are designing for and then design for yourself. In this way of understanding what design is, the process can be described as acquiring and using a 1^st person perspective and stepping back and applying an outsiders point of view, your own as a designer, a 3^rd person perspective on the problem.

This requires two orthogonal qualities. As designers, we need empathy to understand people and we need director skills in order to impose our view of the world. Without one the other is useless. If we don’t have empathy then our point of view will be just ours. We will construe the task we are designing for on our terms and we will deliver something that is most likely strongly us but with an inadequate understanding of the real task and without regard for the human beings who will use our solution’s real needs and desires. On the other hand if we have only empathy and no point of view or the will to impose it, then we are not designers. Design is by and large about what the world should be like. And the strength of the ‘should’ is determined by our experience and vocabulary. I believe that this is what we primarily bring to the table, an ability to envision the world being different, but again, without the empathy that will be a hollow vision.

To some extent this may sound like method acting. I think the difference is that in design it is crucial that you also step back and get the outsider's perspective.

Fidelity vs Intention

2008-08-26T16:16:00.000-07:00

Bill Buxton has given us a language to talk about Design and various stages. He has introduced the distinction between getting the right design and getting the design right

Buxton has also talked a lot about hand drawings and sketches. Per his yellow book the difference between a sketch and a prototype is not the fidelity but the intention and what it communicates. I personally talk about it as describing "what could be" vs. "what should be".

I think however that there is a tendency to grasp on to the notion of hand drawings (or finger paint as I heard in one presentation (sic.)) and talk about it as if the are the solution to all early design thinking. I would suggest that they are not. Different problems need different solutions and fidelity does not equal done-ness

I am all for doing the right thing given the phase of the project and the problem at hand. But I am very much against lack of critical thinking and dogmatism. Communicating something through a hand drawing does not make it a sketch. I know people who can draw rectangles and scribbles but at the exact relative size so they can make very precise specifications for placement by hand and I know people who can express crazy far out ideas pixel perfectly.

Can you design anything? -Vocabulary vs. Process

2008-08-10T16:21:00.000-07:00

I have had this conversation with another designer on my team a couple of times. The kind of conversation that goes something like this: "...and then we needed to do x, and you know me, I can design anything, it is all just design, so of course I did y...."

Over the past couple of weeks I have been thinking about how much we mean when we say "anything". And why we would say "anything" at all. Could I design a ship? a spaceship? a car? a sandwich? My basic answer is going to be "yes" but with the caveat that it would take me quite some time to design some of those things. More than it would certain other people.

To some it should seem completely insane that I would even answer yes to some of those challenges, but I think I could because the design process is fundamentally the same. You need to go through the same steps regardless of whether you are designing a building or a piece of software. You do however need a different vocabulary depending on the domain you are designing within. Since I do not have any sort of vocabulary for boats and a very limited one about houses, my designs for those would either be naive or take a long time because I would have to build up the concepts and experience within those domains in order to go beyond layman terms.

A vocabulary is like a language. It is the concepts you can use to talk about a given domain. For software words like 'direct', 'desirable, 'predictable', and 'fluid' are part of our vocabulary. Part of knowing a language is also knowing its grammar which is like knowing which solutions to bring to a problem and how to stitch them together to make a whole. For us this is knowing the "dual listboxes" pattern for creating a subset from a static list and being able to extend that to work for a dynamic list/multiple sources. Or being able to recognize that in a certain situation that is not the right pattern to use.

Becoming a designer is by and large learning the design process and learning the vocabulary of at least one domain. Once you are fluent or at least reasonably 'well spoken' in one domain, acquiring the vocabulary of a second domain becomes much easier. Now you know what it feels like to know a design language, so you will have a tacit understanding of what you need in a new area. The time it takes you to learn the new language depends upon how close it is to the other languages you know and what other knowledge you can draw upon. I have lived in a few houses, been in quite a few, traveled a bit, and seen houses from different ages. I am still a layman when it comes to architecture, but should I decide to pursue that field, I will be able to draw on that knowledge while I learn the language of buildings. Should I choose to try my luck at spaceships, the amount of knowledge I can bring along is significantly smaller.

When my colleague and I say "anything" we usually mean "anything digital". Within that domain we have a rich vocabulary and it does not matter if it is a reporting service, a filter design, or an information site. They are all part of the same set of 'things'. Should you however ask us to design a house, you may end up with something quite ordinary, and you may even have to be lucky for it to work properly. Or else you would have to give us the time to learn the right language.

The Email Interface vs. Email as a Bridge

2008-08-04T16:25:00.000-07:00

"It is just like email. Make it like outlook". Those words have been said in more than one executive meeting and you and I have both been in discussions where someone ended the argument with "well, that is how it is done in Outlook, so we must do the same to be consistent".

But few make the argument that you should simply not build any UI but just use email. Now, this is different from for instance Dynamics CRM, Dynamics Business Contact Manager, or Dynamics Small Business Application that all build additional UI inside Outlook. Khoi Vinh instead writes about companies that don't make additional UI, but use email as a bridge, an way to exchange and collect information. The idea is to build on something people already use and already has their own workflows for.

Designer & Developer Collaboration -hmm, yeah, maybe

2008-06-25T16:33:00.000-07:00

Stop, stop, stop. Just stop. Step back. Breathe. Deeply. Again. Now let's talk. Designers are not developers. We are not and do not want to be. Yes, designers should know the material they are working with an in the case of interaction designers the material is in some way and to some extent code. So as a Designer you should understand some code and it helps even more to understand how it comes about. It always helps to appreciate the work of the people you work with.

But it cuts two ways.

And I am sick and tiered of the oversimplification of the designer job that reduces it to implementation and production. This is the simplification that runs through articles such as Google Enters Designer, Developer Fray, Designers who also develop have more power, and to a certain extent The New Iteration. In Bill Buxton's words, all of those articles focus on the part of the project where you get the design right, none of them pays any attention to the time spent getting the right design.

My beef with WPF

In my understanding WPF has two promises:

A better UI platform with higher engineering efficiency and capabilities of a richer UI
That developers and Designers can work together on the same artifact.

Let's get #1 out of the way. WPF has delivered on number one to an B+. With some of the improvements in 3.5 and planned for later we are nearing an A, and once we have real time bitmap effects I will gladly hand out the A+. Great job all around and just looking brighter and brighter.

For number two however, I am less impressed. To be fair, I think WPF and Blend has set themselves an impossible goal. How do you make something that is a real development platform easy to use for people who by-and-large cannot code. My most mundane example of where the platform sticks it head up in blend is the difference between items controls and normal controls. Some can contain one element, others can contain many. And well, just the whole concept of controls is not that hard to understand, but still is slightly foreign. And then there is the difference between "content" and "text" properties that you just have to know something about the platform to understand why those are different. Not so different form HTML + CSS just much larger and more complex. Try for instance to compare writing CSS with XAML templates and Styles and yell when you get to RelativeSource RelativeParent And remember how long HTML has been around and that you still have many designers working with web who work in Photoshop and Illustrator and never touch HTML. Yes, I know, developers don't like that, but this is al part of not trivializing design. Not even the 'get the design right' part.

Blend is a good application. It is far from complete but i strongly support any team that finishes an area before they move on to the next and I think the Blend team does that very well. It is however still an application for implementation. At least it is for now. I hear they are thinking about making it better for prototyping. When asked when I use Blend for my design work I usually respond that "I don't". Which is only a half lie. I do, but only for the implementation oriented last part of the design process. People are usually surprised because they have heard WPF should be a great designer's platform and so they assume that the deliverables at the end of the project = the design work. Which would be the same as saying the code = the developer's work which would leave out all credit for any kind of architectural thinking.

What grade should we give WPF for the designer + developer collaboration? I am tempted at a very low score, but maybe that is unfair. Maybe what should get called out instead is that they grossly oversold it and yes, under delivered. And I think more people should read Karsten Januszewski & Jaime Rodriguez white paper and use their categorizations for the roles designers and developers play in a project. A lot of misunderstandings between developers and designers and between management and ICs could be avoided if people were real clear about the roles they expect in the project, and if people would understand that all this talk about WPF is about the last stage of the design process. It is what you start working with once you are done with the hard part; getting to the right design.

Interviews with UX pioneers

2008-05-14T16:48:00.000-07:00

http://www.adlininc.com/uxpioneers/

Ben Shneiderman, Alan Cooper, Cliff Nass, Jakob Nielsen, and Carol Barnum.

What about Phones

2008-05-09T16:51:00.000-07:00

A while back there was a lot of research around the BRIC countries. Brazil, Russia, India, and China. Now Africa is popping up more and more in the news as a future growth market. Yet I don't know what our Server vision outside of North America / Europe. Do we not see a difference? Will the explosion in mobile devices be felt there first? Craig Mundie will do his part to make it so: http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&articleId=9084018&intsrc=news_ts_head

Does design save?

2008-02-05T15:55:00.000-08:00

http://www.subtraction.com/archives/2008/0204_design_could.php

Thoughtful post on whether Design can save business. Case in point: Yahoo!

When cruft creeps in

2007-12-14T15:57:00.000-08:00

A thoughtful fairly short post from 37 signals about cleaning up your UI from time to time. http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/730-when-cruft-creeps-in

The Ten Faces of Innovation

2007-12-14T15:56:00.000-08:00

The ten Faces of Innovation by Tom Kelly of IDEO describes 10 roles usually found in innovative groups. Now, this isn't one of my usually book summary/reviews. Mainly because I do not have to. Someone did all the hard work up front. Read the first chapter of the book at Fast Company: http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/99/faces-of-innovation.html and get a more detailed list of the ten roles at the book website: http://www.tenfacesofinnovation.com/tenfaces/index.htm

And then go read the book :)

It is well written, with good stories, and it felt reinvigorating and got me thinking about all the things I know we should do that we don't, and gave me some ideas for getting better.

The tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell

2007-10-01T17:02:00.000-07:00

Roberts' book "Lovemarks" does not, in my opinion, provide enough believable examples of products that people actually love. Malcolm Gladwell's "the Tipping Point" does. Roberts talks about the inherent qualities of your service and your product, what I would call the Foundation for love. Gladwell explains why some products become loved but more specifically, how a product goes from being loved by a few to being liked by many.

Gladwell's starting point is "word of mouth". What is it and why is it effective. That investigation led him to social epidemics and he looks into what the makes something go from a phenomenon among an elite to a widespread fashion. What tips an idea over the edge from obscurity to common understanding. Why is Youtube so popular and not one of the many other video sites that came up at the same time. How did Google go from relative obscurity to being the defacto standard for search and why did the non-skateboarding youth adopt AirWalk so sales climbed from 4 millions to 64 millions. What is it that pushes something over the tipping point.

Here is a summary of Gladwell's book. This time without page numbers as I listened to the audio book rather than read it.

Mavens, Connectors, and Salesmen

Gladwell finds that it takes three kinds of people to tip an idea:

Mavens (one who accumulates knowledge)
Connectors
And Salesmen

Mavens are the MVPs of the world. Enthusiasts and specialists. Is there a person whom you would ask about car purchases, wine, or maybe even soap? Someone who knows a lot about the subject matter and who is also, and this is essential, genuinely interested in helping you and sharing his or her knowledge. Those are the Mavens of the world.

Connectors are people who collect people. They have many interests and know people from many different backgrounds. And they want to connect them, make them meet and see what happens.

Salesmen are translators. They translate between innovators, either a company or some sub culture, and the crowd. Salesmen are the ones who take a a trend among hipsters and twists and turns it ever so slightly to make it fit in with the larger masses, hence making it acceptable and digestible for them.

Gladwell describe a series of epidemics, both sickness and social, where each of the roles played a key part. There is the story about AirWalk that hired a fashion Maven and an advertising company (salesman) to boost sales significantly. There is AIDS and Syphilis spreading through connectors, and there is Lexus who succeeded because they understood that in the beginning, they were selling primarily to mavens, and by treating them very well, they would spread the word.

The three laws of epidemics

Through these examples, Gladwell gets to the three laws of epidemics:

The law of the few
The stickiness factor
and the Power of Context

The law of the few basically states that only few people matter when an epidemic spreads. It was a few very sexually active people that spread the Syphilis epidemic in Baltimore, and a few people who started the Hushpuppy (shoes) epidemic.

An ideas with low stickiness factor will not, well…, stick. What makes something sticky depends on the subject matter, but a common thread is that if people have to do something to comprehend the message, they are more vested in it and it sticks better. The examples given are from Sesame street and Blue's Clues, both children television, that are sticky because the children have to work to understand them.

The chapters on the Power of Context uses the stark drop in crime in New York based on a zero tolerance politics as its main argument. By focusing on the details, you set the context for what is and isn't acceptable and change the overall behavior. The other chapter on the Power of Context is about how many people we as human beings can deal with, turns out to be 150, and explains why introducing something to us in a smaller context makes it possible to understand.

Is there a Cure ?

An epidemic is (can be) a disease. And diseases have cures. People become immune. Immunity is what makes fashion trends die, and renders marketing schemes useless. Immunity is the reason telemarketing and spam works less and less. Gladwell, does not cover immunity further except in the chapter on AirWalk and how they stayed fresh.

How can we use this book?

If we look back on Roberts' book on "Lovemarks" the reason to get an emotional connection is essentially, in Gladwell's terms to build context and make the product sticky.

When we look at our MVP engagements in terms of Mavens and learn from Lexus, we can see that we do right in focusing on the few, and in treating them exceptionally well.

We can also use this book to understand why some small technology companies grow big and why some do not. And we can think about how we stay fresh and do not make people immune to our message.

From a strategy perspective, this book is a good help in thinking about how we roll out new IT management paradigms, both in how we drive adoption internally, and in how we sell it externally. The book can also be used to help us think about how we change the engineering culture of Microsoft. And somewhere in the back of my head the little Toyota-Apple bird keeps chattering about zero tolerance and continuous improvement… Both initiatives that, taken out of context, and without the right set of Maven, Connectors, and Salesmen are sure to be doomed. But maybe, just maybe if we had….

Final thoughts

I like listening to Malcolm Gladwell's audio books. He has a wordy style with lots of good stories mixed in that makes his books good substitutes for non-fiction. Good for entertainment during the commute. I also like his books because he gets a lot out of a narrow topic. "Blink", his other book shares the same qualities and if you want to know why we need salesmen to translate from the elite to the crowd, I think blink is a good starting point.

Both of Gladwell's books have made it into what I consider the canon of new business literature along with Freakonomics, The Long Tail, and The Paradox of Choice among others.

Lovemarks –the Future beyond brands

2007-09-07T17:05:00.000-07:00

Lovemarks –the future beyond brands by Kevin Roberts, CEO Worldwide, Saatchi & Saatchi. ISBN: 1-57687-270-x

How do you make products that people will not only think are great products, but products that they will be loyal too beyond reason? The classic examples of Lovemarks are Apple, Harley Davidson, Zippo, and Coca Cola. Products that all live up to the definition of love in Kevin Robert's book: "Loyalty beyond reason".

Roberts' gives some interesting and helpful advice but packages it in a whole lot of noise about Saatchi & Saatchi, Proctor and Gamble, and adds even more noise to the message through a rather busy book layout. If you can get beyond all the noise however, there are important lessons to be learned from this book.

Go to http://www.lovemarks.com/ to get a taste of what it is all about. Well, what the end result is about and what the surface looks like. Then read the book to understand what is behind it.

Roberts' core thesis is that with an ever increasing array of products, we need to move beyond brands. Brands are built upon respect, but only demands loyalty within reason. Beyond that point lays Lovemarks, built on the company's love and respect for their customer and in return given love and loyalty beyond what you could reasonably expect by their customers.

If you do not believe humans are powered by emotion rather than by reason or that emotions matter in product design, read the first couple of chapters and spend some time reading up on car design, or hang out on some Apple fan boy websites. If you just want to get to the "How" part, here is a list of interesting passages in the book:

Pages 42-45: Primary and secondary emotions

Primary emotions: Brief and intense	Secondary Emotions: More complex and combine the head with the heart
Joy	Love
Sorrow	Guilt
Anger	Shame
Fear	Pride
Surprise	Envy
Disgust	Jealousy

Page 52: Six truths about love

Human beings need love, without it they die
Love means more than liking a lot. Love is about a profound sense of attachment.
Love is about responding, about delicate, intuitive sensing. Love is always two way.
Love is not just one kind of relationship. There is love between spouses, family members and between friends. For Kevin Roberts it is about Bruce Springsteen concerts, Saturday nights, and a cold Becks beer.
Love takes rime. Love has history, love gives us meaning and makes us who we are.
Love cannot be commanded or demanded. It can only be given.

While some of this may seem banal if you are talking about love between people, I think an interesting passage because it emphasizes what Roberts is really talking about, and just how radically he means it. I especially like number 2 in the context of product design. We are talking about more than "liking a lot".

Pages 60-63: Respect, a foundation for love

Respect is a pre-requisite for love.

Perform, perform, perform: Respect grows out of peak performance at every interaction
Pursue innovation: Continuous improvement (kaizen)
Commit to total commitment: The active consumer judges you at every encounter
Make it easy: If it is hard to use, it will die
Don't hide: People can respect you only if they know who you are
Jealousy guard your reputation: Reputation is built over a lifetime and destroyed in a second
Get in the lead and stay there
Tell the truth: Front up, be open. Admit mistakes. Don't cover up, it will get you every time.
Nurture Integrity:
Accept responsibility: take on the biggest responsibility of all –to make the world a better place for everyone
Never pull back on service: Service is where transactions are transformed into relationships.
Deliver great design: If you are not aesthetically stimulating and functionally effective you just merge into the crowd.
Don't underestimate value: Both dollar value and perception of value. Only if people perceive the value as higher than the cost will they respect the deal you offer
Deserve trust:
Never, ever fail the reliability test: Expectations skyrocket> Cars always start the first time, the coffee's always hot, the ATM is always open…

"it is a tough list. Demanding and uncompromising. Don't even dream about Lovemark Status unless you can tick off each and every item"

Page 70: Difference between Brand and Lovemark

Brand	Lovemark
Information	Relationship
Recognized by consumers	Loved by people
Generic	Personal
Presents a narrative	Creates a Love story
The promise of quality	The touch of sensuality
Symbolic	Iconic
Defined	Infused
Statement	Story
Defined Attributes	Wrapped in mystery
Values	Spirit
Professional	Passionately creative
Advertising Agency	Ideas company

Pages 74-79 Mystery, Sensuality, and Intimacy.

"Lovemarks are not owned by the manufactures, the producers, the businesses. They are owned by the people who love them."

Principles of Lovemarks:

Be passionate. Consumers can smell a fake a mile off. If you are not in love with your own business, they won't be either.
Involve customers: Involve customers in product design
Celebrate loyalty:
Find, tell, & retell great stories
Accept responsibility: love is two ways. If people love your product, you have to love them back with everything that includes.

Mystery, Sensuality, and Intimacy is what makes a truly great product stand out.

Chapter 8-10 (pages 81-144) is about Mystery, Sensuality, and Intimacy. Too much to list here. If you go read the book, then at least browse these chapters. If you then want to use it, go read the chapters.

P 149. Respect and Love graph

My opinion of the book

I like the thoughts in this book. I really do. I also think that the content is relevant for making great products. But Lovemarks? I would like to go back to one of six truths about love: "Love cannot be commanded or demanded. It can only be given." And that is where I think the book if not the thinking breaks down. Kevin Roberts does give a recipe for building products that is beyond our normal definition of great, products that have the potential to be more than just good products and be great experiences through not only the product itself, but the connection with the organization behind it and the other people who enjoy the product. This piece about the organization cannot be underplayed. I have spoken about products throughout this review, but really it is more than that. It is an organization connecting to people through products and services. However, most of Kevin Roberts' examples fall short. Both his examples of how Saatchi & Saatchi has helped turn brands in to Lovemarks and the testimonials on the website and the in the book about products people love leave out one crucial piece of information/context. Most of the testimonials people give are about products that they like a lot, not products that they love. And if they love a product, it is usually because it reminds them of their actual childhood or a person they love. Not because of some story, however compelling, that happened to someone else.

Does it work? Yes! I think Kevin Roberts prove beyond doubt that if you do everything he suggests, you will sell more products, and you will make more people happy and more loyal to your brand. But you can't engineer love, you can only put the bricks in place so that some (few) people will make that extra jump. And I think Kevin Roberts' book, despite all the noise, does provide a good direction for how you can make it more likely that some people will make the jump. But I think he makes promises where none should be made.

Paint. The future is in the past

2007-08-14T09:59:00.000-07:00

Fantastic video about Paint. Funny on so many levels

The user experience: The iceberg analogy of usability

2007-07-27T17:08:00.000-07:00

Dick Berry

An older article but still relevant, the article talks about how user experience is more than look and feel. It elaborates on the importance of the user model in understanding who the users with regards to their skills and motivations. Read article

Yes, design can make you happy

2007-07-02T00:06:00.000-07:00

A couple of quotes from Stefan Sagmeister's ted talk: Yes, design can make you happy

Happiness and design

2007-07-01T23:45:00.000-07:00

It is all about creating products that people will love, or is it? Maybe it is about making products that make people happy. But what makes happiness or love? I would venture that products that show embedded intelligence and embedded emotions i.e. knows what you are trying to do / knows your business and lets you do hard things easily or in other words give you the surprise of Wow, that was easy, are good candidates. However, it takes more. It takes being able to make them yours and that can happen in many ways, like the VW beetle that you put flowers on or the piece of software that you can customize to work just the way you want. Emacs springs to mind.

I think love is secondary and not really the goal. KRS One said it very well so long ago "love is an overused word, love you car, love you watch. You should love yourself and other human beings, not things" (paraphrased). Things can make you happy though if they work for you, not against you. And if they are willing to become yours and help you express yourself. It is the combination of the value add/ signal value of a brand/product + what it actually lets you do to it. It is the "i am part of the Emacs tribe + I have mastered Emacs and it bids my will" or the "I am part of the Porsche tribe and I relax when I drive with the top down".

I am really just thinking out loud here, but I think that happiness is an achievable goal while love may not be. Or maybe it i, but with product love comes cult, and with cult comes elitism and it is hard to sell to everybody when you are an elite product. And yep, Apple makes elite products but they mainstream them. The Ipod is not an elite product, it is a commoner’s tool that makes happy, but not love.

I really did like them...

2007-06-22T23:18:00.000-07:00

Microsoft Office's adaptable menus get a lot of flag. And I do not get it. I really like the adaptale menus. They cut away the crud, the stuff I do not use or want to use. I kinda miss them in other programs

Just make it work

2007-06-07T08:27:00.001-07:00

David Platt (http://www.amazon.com/Why-Software-Sucks-What-About/dp/0321466756 ) has a good and fortunately very popular talk here at Teched on "Why your software sucks" aimed at the very developers that write the software. IT is basic stuff like "your users are not you" but David Platt's examples and instance on "Just make it work" makes me reconsider some of what I have been thinking about for our Group Policy designs. Are we really making it just work?

So making GP just work is one thing. Hard to do because you can easily be overwhelmed by all the things you also make the software do and all the complexity you could expose. But the notion talks well to my corner stone thought that you have to build in knowledge about what people should do.

But how do you accomplish "Just make it work" and "you are always building a platform"? The latter is just as important as it states that the role of a design team is to make a UI that lets you, the person who paid us to work for you, able to recompose, reconfigure, and mash together a new use for our software that we did not anticipate. How do we anticipate your next move and at the same time let you redefine what your next moves are going to be in the future.

I can't say I have an answer yet. I think we have to separate the focus. You always have access to the data. But we make a purposeful UI based on one understanding of you. Maybe that is too old fashioned, too old school. Hmmm, still thinking.

Security going the way of Usability

2007-06-05T21:20:00.000-07:00

Steve Riley, a Microsoft Security strategist, spoke today about balancing security concerns against usability and cost. Steve is an excellent speaker and made some great points about what is basically risk assessment/management.

Steve’s focus on economics and on rephrasing all security questions as economic questions reminds me a whole lot about usability discussions over the past decade or so. Security, Performance, and Usability share the characteristic of being basically not-interesting. They are assumed and only considered when they are absent. No one buys a product because it is secure, performs well, or is usable UNLESS that is not the standard in the category and then that is just an indication of an immature product category. The trio of Security, Performance, and Usability plays the role of the base-guitar of any product. It lays the foundation for a great user experience, but it does not make up a product.

In his 1994 book “Usability Engineering” Jakob Nielsen spends a long time on ROI, talking the language of the C-level folks and so on. Same path as Steve is walking with security now. And I believe the future for at least Security and Usability will also share many characteristics. Usability went from after the fact quality control to a design discipline and is making its inroads into product definition and strategic asset. In other words, Usability as a discipline has moved from cost center to primary value generator.

Some of the talks I have seen here at TechEd leads me to believe that Security could take a similar role. Security is not about fiddling with settings, but about making IT behave in a way that gives the business a competitive edge. If for instance the IT department can demolish the stupid wall between inside the firewall vs. outside the firewall and give all employees access to company resources regardless of location or computer, then a major hurdle will have been removed for when & where to work and will ultimately make the company more competitive and productive. If security can enable this scenario, then that is a strategic business initiative, not some after the fact patch update or firefighting.

TechEd

2007-06-05T20:47:00.001-07:00

I am at TechEd in Orlando and it is super cool. First of all, the entire conference is extremely well planned and executed. Second, the content is really good. Third, regardless of what people may think about MS I think DevDiv and Server spit out one fantastic product after another.

All the WPF stuff including the VS support, Blend, Design, and latest Silverlight is just pure plain awesome.

Server 2008 is great. System Center Essentials is mega cool. heck, loads of good stuff.

And we also have stuff that just suck or products with really exiting technology wraped in a horrible UI. But I think our new products have decent to great UI and there are fewer and fewer of the "arrg, that sucks" products. All goodness.

The constants of life

2007-06-05T20:39:00.001-07:00

The principle of non-contradiction
is
a constant
in my and your life
despite what people say
They just do not understand
that it is a constant
like reorgs.

Designing for Interaction

2007-04-15T17:11:00.000-07:00

I just finished "Designing for Interaction" and will say it was a really good and relatively fast read.

Most of the content should be known to most of you. Like chapter 6 that goes through various controls and their usages. The author does however draw some good analogies between physical and digital controls.

Interesting moments of the book:

The epiphany in chapter 4 on design research. I keep calling us a "design team" even though I know it annoys some of our user researchers. I think it would make sense to rename the user research profession in MS to Design Research. What we ultimately do is to conduct the research necessary to drive, inform, and challenge the design. A lot of that has to do with users, but not all of it. I think renaming it to Design Research would change the focus and expand the focus in a healthy way.

Chapter 7 and the discussion of "hackability" and of "adaptive" UI. It was an interesting read in general and furthered my long held belief that "you are always designing a platform" i.e. you have to assume that your product will be used in ways you did not imagine and you should embrace that and encourage that. Offhand (and I would be happy to discuss off-line) it led me to some thought about how we need a community around Models (additions and changes to CML) and how we can (mis-)use the CMDB and the Local CMDB to move personalizations, explicit and implicit, around in an environment. Suffice to say it could be done with policies J

Chapter 8 on Service Design is really interesting from the perspective of what the UX discipline could ultimately become once we start being more active in the design of how we sell servers, the SKUs, and all that stuff.

Throughout the book there is food for thought on the difference between user centered design (personas), activity based design (scenarios), and I must say, that I currently believe in the role based design approach , and I see that as a good unifier for user & activity based design. User centered design is too concerned with the goal of the user and activity based design is too concerned with the scenario sans-role. My role is Exchange admin. Because of that, I have some goals and some activities I need to complete. But sometimes my role changes to just ordinary server admin or to security admin and those secondary roles require a different UI for me than they would for a person with the primary role of server admin or security admin.

The beauty of Scripting languages

2007-03-22T22:32:00.000-07:00

Just learned about xkcd a faboulous comic.

John Bolton on John Stewart

2007-03-20T22:40:00.000-07:00

I am watching Jon Stewart on Comedy Central and his guest is John Bolton and this is super interesting. I may not agree with Mr. Bolton but he is one of the few guests on any show that has survived well. I would say that for once the host did not destroy the guest. Quite unexpected.

Bolton has some interesting views about democracy that basically goes along this line: You vote for a president and hence a way of running the country in other words you should expect the president to replace everyone in the administration with people who agree with him. John Stewart disagrees and thinks that the president should suround himself with people who can question him. It goes on into an interesting and equal discussion.

Interestingly enough this reminds me of the destinction between Denamrk and Sweden. In Sweden the leading party has a history of replacing people in the administration with people of the same political orientation. In Denmark, this is much less common, and usually happens on a smaller scale.

Looking back

2007-03-17T14:08:00.000-07:00

When old men look back
They don't
Regret not
Spending more time in the office

I know this now
Not old
Just know That
I shall regret other things

But today I choose to spend more
Time in
The office
Because I like the drug

Like the coffee and the candy
Instant
Self esteem boost
Work needs doing and work needs me

A good cause

2007-03-17T14:07:00.001-07:00

Live messenger has made a really cool marketing push. Everytime you use messenger you support a cause of your choosing. You can choose from 9 causes. At least you can in the US.

All you have to do is add the cause' tag to your name in messenger. Instructions

Yes it is marketing but it is also so much more. And it is well in line with Microsof tbeing the company in the world tht donates the most amount of money to all kinds of causes.

Moving files with Powershell

2007-02-24T14:54:00.000-08:00

After I reinstalled my computer all the fonts I had gotten of design magasines CDs were gone. I had used one of the fonts in a t-shirt design which was now broken so I had to get them back on my PC. It had been a real pain getting them off the CDs in the first place since most of the mwere either zipped or in a folder and since Vista cannot have folders in its fonts folder (which in itself is stupid) then I had to go through each folder an manually copy the file I wanted to the system Font folder.

Not this time...

The culpits were a selection of fonts from FG. I put all those folders in a new folder:
C:\FGfontTest> and created a sub-folder C:\FGfontTest\OTFonts>
Here is the content of one of those font folders

PS C:\FGfontTest\FGAddiction> ls


    Directory: Microsoft.PowerShell.Core\FileSystem::C:\FGfontTest\FGAddiction


Mode                LastWriteTime     Length Name
----                -------------     ------ ----
-a---         4/22/2006   5:47 PM       4036 FGAddiction.afm
-a---         4/22/2006   5:47 PM        481 FGAddiction.inf
-a---         4/22/2006   5:47 PM      55080 FGAddiction.otf
-a---         4/22/2006   5:47 PM      66649 FGAddiction.pfb
-a---         4/22/2006   5:47 PM        731 FGAddiction.pfm
-a---         4/22/2006   5:44 PM      84604 FGAddiction.ttf
-a---         5/16/2006   6:52 PM        961 fontgarden.txt

I wanted to move all the OTF files to the OTFonts folder. After quite a bit of mocking around I finally got it to work with this script:
PS C:\FGfontTest> Get-ChildItem ./f* -recurse -include *.otf | Move-Item -dest C:\FGfontTest\OTFonts

I didn't come up with this all by myself. My first attempts were along the lines of

PS C:\FGfontTest> foreach ($d in dir f* )
>> { Move-Item $d C:\FGfontTest\OTFonts -filter *.otf }

which did not work.

Finaly example 4 in Get-Help Move-Item -detailed got me unblocked. Get-Childitem (alias is GCI) has a parameter called -recurse which essentially lets you do what I tried to do in the foreach loop only it can dig into arbitrary levels of folders.

Anyway, fonts are moved and now backed up so I won't have to go thorough this next time I install a PC. The cool thing is that Powershell let me do do a repetivie task across many folder with one line of code

-Christian

Tomato Juice

2007-02-22T10:11:00.000-08:00

Tomato juice is, like olives, an aquired taste. But it has its purposes. It is the closest thing to fluid food that is readily available in the office. Good for the hunger.

Talk to the competitive in people

2007-02-18T14:52:00.000-08:00

Talk to the competitive in people when you build software. Let people compete against themselves or others if it makes sense at all. Ask yourself if your software handles something that can be measured, for instance time on data entry, and whether it makes sense to measure.

What can be measured?
Time and money are usually easy to measure and compare. You can measure the time it takes to complete a task or the amount of money someone has spend or earned.

What makes sense to measure?
Will you application be used in an environment where people care about what you can measure? Call center software is a great example. Usually the goal of management is for each call to take as little time as possible, if however you take that mentality to say an in-house call center where it is more important that the calling employee is completely unblocked than the number of calls processed per employee, then you may screw the dynamics in the wrong direction. If you reward high throughput, in your software, then that will produce high throughput behavior and that may not be what the business want.

But if your application will be used in an environment where measurements are valued, then your software should support it.

Call centers, sales applications, data entry applications, and fitness programs are obvious candidates for showing how you perform against your targets, against your previous performance and your colleagues' performance. Point of sale applications is another area where it makes perfect sense to emphasize corporate procedures/politics. Harvard business review had an article in the Winter 06 edition about great managers. One of the examples was from a Walgreens shop. Apparently employees are rewarded based on a 'Suggestive selling program'. Basically Walgreens focuses on a few items, put them near the cashier, and when you are about to pay, they ask you if you also want one of those items. If you end up buying it, they are rewarded on that extra sale. Here is an opportunity to help the employees remember how well they are doing against others and themselves. Let them see how much they have sold, how much the average employee have sold etc. Help them remember, help them focus, and help corporate strategy blossom though talking to the competitive in each of those cashiers.

It is all about talking to the basic human instincts.

Ultimate

2007-02-17T19:35:00.000-08:00

Vista ultimate and Office ultimate. Visual studio, WPF, Blend and Graphic Designer. SmartFTP and Itunes. And of course Powershell. Upgraded my computer today to the modern day and age. ahhh.

Stretching

2007-02-16T18:10:00.000-08:00

Over
Stretched
Want to be over
Performer

Stretching
To reach what I think
I should
See
In the horizon

Designing Pleasurable Products by Patrick K. Jordan

2006-11-26T16:09:00.000-08:00

This book came out in 2000 and I have wanted to read it ever since. This Thanksgiving I finally got it read. As so many times before, I am annoyed I did not read it before, but on the other hand, as always, it fits into my current thinking and maybe I was not ready until now.

Summary

What follows is more a summary than a review.

Jordan starts out describing usability as a dissatisfier. Something that consumers expect. Something that causes annoyance if it is lacking. In many ways it is similar to performance and security. Not something that sells a product, but something that has to be there in order for the product to be taken into consideration in the first place. Jordan goes on to argue that

"usability based approaches to design are – in effect, if not in intention – dehumanizing. This is because such approaches tend to encourage a view of people as simply cognitive and physical processors in a user-product-task system" p.205

Instead of a usability based approach Jordan proposes a more holistic way of looking at humans and that the goal for product development should be to create pleasurable products. Pleasurable products covers

"the emotional, hedonic and practical benefits associated with products" p.12

In short Jordan's arguments for going beyond the usability based human factor methodologies are the now often heard more new sales and more repeat sales. Basically the arguments that has led the trend in branding books for the past decade or so. If you can design a product that emotionally appeal to the consumers they will be more likely to buy it, and once bought they are more likely to develop a emotional relationship to the product and the brand and hence to buy more of that brand.

This book is to my knowledge one of the first books that actually help you design pleasurable products instead of just showing you products that succeeded.

The outline of the book is:

Define a framework of four pleasures
Use the framework to examine people characteristics i.e. how to look holistically at people
Make a Products benefit specification for your product.
1. Based on the holistic picture of a target group, understand what benefits/needs your product will fulfill.
Introduce formal and experiential product properties.
1. The formal property of Chrome is 'shiny/reflective'. The experiential property may be cool, modern, or tacky depending on who experiences it.
Derive a property specification for your product.
Evaluate the desirability of your design.

1. Define a framework of four pleasures

Physio-Pleasure:
- This is to do with the body - pleasures derived from the senses. In the context of products physio-pleasure would cover, for example, tactile and olfactory properties as well as ergonomic issues.
  - Smell inside a new car
Socio-Pleasure:
- This is the enjoyment derived from relationships with others. Products and services may help to enhance or facilitate particular social situations and may confer social or cultural status on the user.
  - Porsche for 'yuppies' and Dr Marten's boots for skinheads
Psycho-Pleasure:
- This type of pleasure refers to people's cognitive and emotional reactions - including their reactions to the products and services that they use.
  - A word processor that helps you spell provides higher Psycho-pleasure than one which does not
Ideo-Pleasure:
- This concerns people's values. It is important that the values embodied in products and services are consistent with the values of those for whom they have been designed.
  - Mercedes advertising that 90% of their C-class cars can be reused. Plays to people who value environmental responsibility

For the Ideo-pleasures Jordan draws upon Geert Hofstede's cultural dimensions. These can be used not only on cultures but also of consumer/customer segments

Power distance
- The degree to which the less powerful members of society expect there to be differences in the levels of power
Individualism vs. collectivism
- The extent to which people are expected to stand up for themselves, or alternatively act predominantly as a member of the group or organization
Masculinity vs femininity – (Jordan uses Toughness vs. Tenderness)
- Refers to the value placed on traditionally male or female values. Masculine cultures value competitiveness, assertiveness, ambition, and the accumulation of wealth and material possessions, whereas feminine cultures place more value on relationships and quality of life.
Uncertainty avoidance
- Reflects the extent to which a society attempts to cope with anxiety by minimizing uncertainty
Long vs short term orientation
- Describes a society's "time horizon," or the importance attached to the future versus the past and present.

To summarize, the usability approach deals almost exclusively with psycho-pleasure and for physical products that is only 1 of 4. For software, I think that I would lump the visual design in under Physio-pleasure and that would also give software four pleasures to play upon.

2. Use the framework to examine people characteristics

In this chapter lists examples of characteristics related to each of the four pleasure:

Physio

Special advantages: Skills learned of inherent, physical attributes like strength or dexterity. Military hardware can assume skilled people in good physical condition
Special disadvantages: Permanent or temporary. Blindness or pregnancy each bring about disadvantages in particular situations
Musculo-skeletal: The Xbox controller was initially to large for the average Japanese
External body: height, weight, body shape. Hair, eye and skin color. Men are on average taller and heavier than women. I am just about too tall for a Mazda Miata. Not for a Porshe.
Body Personalization: hairstyle, bodily and facial hair. Contact lenses vs. glasses.
Physical environment: Temperature, humidity, lightning.
Physical dependencies: dependency on cigarettes, drugs (legal or illegal) or alcohol
Reaction to the physical environment: Reaction to heat or cold. Allergies.

Socio

Sociological: Country and culture. In the western world products designed for personal care for women emphasize femininity. Such designs may be considered inappropriate in, for example, the Muslim-governed countries of the Middle East.
Status: A person's standing in society.
Social Self-image: your idea about yourself. Many products have a role as 'Social accessories' à underlines how you would like others to see you
Social relations: Friends, family and loved ones.
Social labels: Gender, age, ethnic origin construed by others. Or through clothes etc. Punk, Skinhead, Goth.
Social personality traits: Generous, sense of community, sense of responsibility. Conformity vs. rebelliousness.
Social lifestyles: Glamorous or fun-seeking lifestyles. Family men/women.

Psycho

Special talents and difficulties: Intelligence, skill, and creativity.
Psychological arousal (low or high): Feeling alert, stressed, tired, bored etc. Or may be driving a car or a glass watcher on his/her second shift. Trying to shut off a machine: in the US off = up. In UK off = Down.
Personality traits: Steady attitudes (as opposed to moods). Extrovert, introvert
Self-confidence: A particular pertinent example of this is in people's attitudes towards computers
Learned skills and knowledge: Formally instructed or learned over time. QWERTY is proven to be less efficient than Dvorak. Still QWERTY sells better.

Ideo

Personal ideologies: Ideologies that a person uses, or tries to use, as a basis for personal lifestyle choices. Adherence to traditional family values would be an example.
Religious beliefs: beliefs or lack thereof.
Social ideology: Respect for authority, environmentalism, political correctness
Aspiration: success in career. Success in family life.

3. Make a Products benefit specification for your product

Mercedes C-class: Product should be sporty, show high social status, and be environmentally friendly.

Go through the four pleasures and understand what the characteristics of your target audience is. What benefit does your product provide. Jordan uses the design of a camera for Western women 25-35 of high socio-economic status:

4 of 12 benefits:

Camera should feel good in hand
Camera should be easy to carry around
Camera should be operable without causing damage to the user's fingernails
Camera should reflect the users' femininity

4. formal and experiential product properties

Formal property: A motorcycle may have a top speed of 120 mph.

Experiential property: If you are a competitive racer, you may think this is slow. If however you use it for commuting you may consider it fast.

Elements of product design:

Color
Form
Product graphics
Materials
Sound
Interaction Design

5. Derive a property specification for your product.

How does your target audience perceive various colors, materials etc.

If for instance we want a camera that feels good in the customer's hand, then it must be nicely balanced, not too heavy yet heavy enough that it still feels solid and of high quality. The size must also fit the Western women 25-35 hand size.

You go from "not too heavy" to a formal weight range.

"Camera should reflect the users' femininity" may be translated to elegance and elegance may be translated to the material for instance stainless steel in a matt texturing. Femininity may also translated to a more organic / round shape unless it conflicts with the goal of elegance/ status

6. Evaluate the desirability of your design

Page 136-204 of the book is dedicated to a summary of various methods for evaluating designs. A lot of them are well known user reseach and marketing methods like Private camera conversation, Co-discovery, Focus groups, experience diaries, and participatory design.

I browsed most of this part of the book but stopped and read about Kansei Engineering (p.178) and SEQUAM (p.182). Both are methods for relating formal properties to experiential properties. Quite interesting and a bit hard to explain. Basically you take a wide range of different designs of the same product, the example is a coffee can, and describe its formal properties. Then you have a group of potential customers score it on experiential properties. Milky, soft, sweet, masculine, adult, strong are the examples. Then you correlate the data, build a database and then, when you want to design a masculine coffee can you look it up, and find that a large logo is correlated with masculine. Interesting. I would like to learn more about this.

And now for the review part

I really like this book. It is fairly short and easily read. It is written as a textbook and it shows. In a good way. It is useful, not just inspiring. I am annoyed I did not read it before, but reading it now, I can see how it fits right into the design principle discussion. It gives a good set of tools to talk about and design Aspen to be more than just a framework. But be a framework that by default builds pleasurable products that do more than just lower the TCO of Windows Server. Products that make it a pleasurable experience to own and administer windows servers. Products that make it really compelling to stay on windows servers in the future and to use Microsoft products to administer them.

RulerBreaker

Graduations of MTB Fail

1. You have to put a foot down for balance. Also know as 'dip'

2. Don’t lose bike. Both feed down.

3. Lose the bike but don’t fall

4. Lose bike and you are on the ground but don’t get hurt.

5. Fall and get flesh wounds

6. Fall and get hurt and you are limping for more than a day but less than a week. Bruises.

7. It really hurts. You aren't out of riding, but walking or lifting things is annoying for a couple of weeks

8. You are out for a bit. Can ride with pain killers, may have permanent nerve damage

9. Break something and you cannot ride for a while. May need surgery

10. Fully or semi paralyzed. You will probably never ride again.

11. Death

So Tired of Zombies

Office on Windows Live

1,2, or 1.5 languages?

Great Video Experiment

Sway: The Irresistible Pull of Irrational Behavior

Loss Aversion

Value Attribution

Diagnosis bias

Links

The book website

Amazon

A couple of reviews/Summaries

Iphone screen broken. Is it more valuable now?

Definition of memorable

Usability does not matter…

I hate ‘users’

Useful? yes. Usable? yes. Desirable? not so much…

Dan Ariely -Predictably Irrational

Got 10-40 Servers? Want Free Software?

Who?

What?

How?

Find us at Teched

Are you an IT Pro and at TechEd 2009 in LA?

People who influenced how I think about design

Victor Papanek

Donald Schön

The Substance of Style

A little criticism

But it is worth reading, and funny

And if you want to learn more

Filtering in Active Directory Administrative Center

What about the last 5%?

A little more on this specific Design

Credits

Social trails

Zune –on Filtering

ITunes –on Filtering

What’s next?

Playlists in Windows Media Player –on Filtering

What’s next?

Would you buy a car from Chevy right now?

A First Look at the Active Directory Administrative Center in the Windows Server 2008 R2 Beta

Playlists in WinAmp –On Filtering

The Advanced Mode

The Query Builder

What works and what doesn’t work?

What’s next?

No, it is not ok!

Different kinds of Filtering

Indexing

Multiple Tag Filtering

Faceted Navigation

Attribute Based Filtering

Rule Based Filtering

Getting deep on Filtering

Terms and Definitions

Attributes, Operators and operands

Boolean filtering

On Filtering

Why Filtering

A Good Time to Quit?

It is you, not me… A Great Ted talk

10 Most Common Misconceptions About User Experience Design

Sometimes you still need locally installed apps

Getting back into the Web

Victor Papanek